It’s almost unbelievable that in the early 2000s, in the wake of a huge rock revival that glorified DIY guitar rock (the White Stripes), sneering punk vocalists (the Vines, Hot Hot Heat), cooler-than-cool swagger (the Strokes, the Hives), attitude-is-everything post punk (Interpol, the Killers), and ironic hair metal (the Darkness, Jet), one unassuming man with an acoustic guitar could whisper-sing his way to notoriety.
Indie
Record #174: Animal Collective – Sung Tongs (2004)
For a while, I held the assumption that everything Animal Collective did before Strawberry Jam was impenetrably avant garde, stomping along like some pagan ritual that had more to do with hollering through synth noises than making anything concerned with the traditional definition of music, let alone pop music. Then, it came to my attention that they had at one point made an acoustic album, and curiosity bade me to seek it out.
Record #169: Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues (2011)
The question to any perfect debut is “Where can we go from here?”
Their self-titled full-length was as close to flawless as a record could get—it’s golden harmonies and Seattle-bluegrass instrumentation combined to form a record that was truly timeless, sounding traditional and contemporary at once.
And so when they returned to the studio to record what would undoubtedly be one of the most anticipated records of the year, they decided (wisely) to expand rather than progress. Continue reading
Record #168: Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes (2008)
I remember the first time I ever heard White Winter Hymnal. Someone had posted the creeping, stop motion video online, and I was spellbound. I gobbled up everything of Fleet Foxes I could–the record, radio performances, their Judee Still cover on Black Cab Sessions, everything. When I returned to college that fall, I spread White Winter Hymnal like gospel (along with Bon Iver, who broke through that same summer). Their mix of Beach Boy harmonies and mountain folk filtered through Seattle sensibilities was at once fresh and familiar. Just how familiar was revealed to me when my roommate responded to the album with “that was Fleet Foxes? I thought you were listening to James Taylor.”
Record #167: Fleet Foxes – Sun Giant (2007)
The phrase “arrived with their sound fully formed” gets thrown around so much that if music critique had their own annual list of banned phrases, it would surely appear in multiple editions. But when confronting Sun Giant, the debut EP by Seattle indie folk giants Fleet Foxes, there’s little else to say.
Record #135: Dntel – Dumb Luck (2007)
Four years before Dumb Luck, Jimmy Tamborello found massive success as one half of indietronic darlings the Postal Service (the other half, of course, being Death Cab For Cutie’s Benjamin Gibbard).
And when I heard that the other guy from the Postal Service was releasing a record, I promise you that I wasn’t the only person who bought it without hearing anything he had done on his own before.
Record #125: Death Cab For Cutie – Narrow Stairs (2008)
A reviewer once called Narrow Stairs “unquestionably the best thing [Death Cab] had ever done.” While I would ask this reviewer if he had ever listened to Transatlanticism, I would agree that Narrow Stairs is the darkest and most ambitious thing they had ever done, sometimes with more in common with Radiohead than with the rest of their catalogue.
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Record #124: Death Cab For Cutie – Plans (2005)
While it doesn’t reach the same unequivocal classicness of Transatlanticism, Plans isn’t a disappointment to its predecessor.
And much to the indie kids’ relief, there’s little here that betrays Death Cab’s newfound major label deal—if you hadn’t seen the Atlantic label on the back, you might think it was recorded for the same tiny label as the rest of their catalog.
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Record #123: Death Cab For Cutie – Transatlanticism (2003)
Of all of the DCFC-disparaging hipsters I know (which I have become on their latest release), I don’t think I’ve heard any of them say a word about Transatlanticism.
That’s probably as much because the record is as close to perfect as any emo-leaning indie band has gotten as it is because every single one of them owned this record when they were in high school and still secretly love it. Continue reading
Record #115: The Antlers – Undersea (2012)
Pete Silberman, frontman and former soloman of the Antlers made his releasing cathartic folk wrapped in ambient textures. Hospice, the project’s breakthrough, was heart wrenching, concept heavy, whisper quiet, and sonically (minus the track Bear) and lyrically devastating. Last year’s Burst Apart, however, saw him, following the addition of another multi-instrumentalist and drummer, shifting from that lyric-heavy catharsis and more fully into the ambience.